Unintended Consequences: What Happens When Reddit Becomes Canada's Town Square
Bill C-18 pushed Canadians to Reddit for news. But Reddit is anonymous, unaccountable, and invisible to Canadian regulators. That's a problem.
After Mark Carney’s announcement this week in Toronto on antisemitism, Rabbi Steve Wernick penned an op-ed in The Globe and Mail. It’s a great piece, and I wanted to share it. Unfortunately in Canada, that is not a simple matter. There are restrictions in place. On some platforms, sharing articles from major newspapers is no longer possible. Not all of them though.
In August 2023, the Canadian government passed the Online News Act, requiring platforms like Meta and Google to negotiate and pay Canadian news publishers for linking to content on their platforms. While Google paid up in response, Meta decided to remove its news content from Facebook and Instagram for all Canadian users. They didn’t want to play ball with the government, so took their toys and went home.
Almost three years later, the big Canadian publications are still bleeding subscribers. Print continues to trend towards extinction, yet more and more content is being created than ever before.
So what happened to all the news-seeking individuals on social media? Where do they go to get their information?
The answer is a social media platform called Reddit.
Reddit is an online forum wherein users can post ideas, photos, articles, and videos within certain topical contexts based on interest - sports, politics, video games, and so on. Reddit divides its content into individual forums called subreddits. Each of these is a mini ecosystem with its own culture and rules.
The platform is designed to amalgamate content that is widely liked, or more precisely “upvoted”, and then serve that content to more people. So when something has mass appeal, it becomes a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
The big caveat with Reddit, however, is that the platform is completely anonymous. You do not know who anyone else is, where they are coming from, or what their expertise is on a given subject. This isn’t an issue when you’re asking for gardening tips. Trust for a stranger on the internet is pretty high when you’re looking for advice on lawn care. With these more niche subreddits, Reddit does a genuinely good job of pushing authority and legitimacy. It is an extremely useful tool, especially on the smaller subreddits where hobbies and special interests are discussed.
A huge problem arises, however, when you start considering wider issues like politics, finance, and public safety. The site is mysteriously absent from the online news act, so sharing news is fair game on Reddit. A nice loophole for the information-hungry, but an issue when you realize that Reddit is, for the most part, not accountable or policed in any meaningfully legitimate way (more on this below). Further, the site has a habit of becoming a massive echo chamber.
This happens because of the way that the up and downvoting operate. It’s a basic popularity contest, so groupthink ideas tend to be overemphasized, especially on larger subreddits.
For example, we can see this clearly in the Toronto subreddit: r/toronto. The population on r/toronto is extremely progressive, fair enough, the majority of chronically online Torontonians lean left. But when a post or article about municipal politics is shared, the sub has tremendous sympathy for the mayor, Olivia Chow, who is of course also left-leaning. For provincial politics, this population reflects hostility toward Premier Doug Ford (who is a Conservative).
Because of the upvote and downvote system, bias is rampant, but not obvious. Further, it is all hidden behind anonymity. So if you try and post anything on r/toronto in favour of Olivia Chow’s biggest challenger for the next mayoral election, Brad Bradford, you are “downvoted” into oblivion by unnamed masses. It is polarization on steroids. This is a major problem as reddit frames and presents these online communities as good, objective places, when in reality they are loaded. Having a balanced discourse on r/toronto is impossible but it’s still the best free place to get amalgamated news on the internet.
Getting downvoted feels bad. There is an emotional sting when a stranger thinks your comment or idea sucks. However, there is also an actual loss of online currency when someone downvotes you on Reddit. There is a feature called “Karma,” which is a rough measure of how much authority your anonymous profile has on the platform. Karma is a wonderful idea in isolation, but it has a major flaw: it is just a summation of other people’s encouragement. This can be achieved by being the first to announce a headline. “Joe Biden wins the Presidency” would have picked up hundreds of thousands of upvotes in the r/news subreddit. Alternatively, it can be achieved by grinding it out, with hundreds of posts and comments on your local sports team over time. The flaw here is that that authority can be achieved by arbitrary means, and that the community deciding what’s best has messed up incentives. Karma also translates across the platform, which means if you are the guru on r/gardening, you have more authority when chiming in on r/physics and vice versa.
This is particularly salient because Reddit is designed to feel objective. It is a masterfully simple and effective psychological trick. Because of the anonymity, when you’re reading a Reddit post, you are inclined to think that the person you are interacting with is just like you. Human brains fill in the blanks.
This illusion of objectivity and truth is central to Reddit’s perceived authority. Because of this mirror effect, people are inclined to trust what they read on the internet, no matter how many times they are told not to. When this starts to move into the realm of topics like geopolitics, you can easily see how this can be problematic. What’s more, because you cannot know or validate who anyone is, there is no proof that they are telling the truth, or that they are a member of the community they claim to represent. There is nothing stopping me — a Canadian living in Toronto — from chiming in on the inner workings of a social issue happening in and being discussed in the subreddit r/Vancouver.
Again, a Reddit user defaults to trusting what they read unless the words themselves are raising serious flags. This is the wonderful original promise of the internet: that the words and ideas are the only thing that matter. But they say that 90% of communication is nonverbal. There is no tone, no insight into the “why” someone is saying something. What’s more, even though you think that your discussion is happening with someone similar to you, it’s just as likely that you are arguing with a child, a bigot, someone with psychosis, or maybe a whacky homeless man. There is a great appeal to this democracy of ideas, but the perception of objectivity that Reddit provides is completely unlike reality.
The primary safety mechanism is fundamentally just a popularity contest.
This matters because when visiting a subreddit like r/toronto, you get served content that is popular in the sub. If there are more upvotes, you’re going to get more servings of that particular piece. A pro-Olivia Chow piece will be served to more people, making the popular more popular, whereas a pro-Brad Bradford piece might get a few views but will certainly be downvoted by the average population of the subreddit. This speaks to immense incumbency bias.
Then there are other more explicit risks. There is nothing stopping a brigade of biased actors from coming into the r/toronto subreddit and using their numbers to control the narrative. The user thinks they are working with an objective platform, but there is no way to know who the person on the other end of the conversation is, or just why they are there.
It would be one thing if it was just the wacky homeless man sitting at the bar downtown, but what if it was a legitimate bad actor from political opposition, or some kind of foreign state. There are no boundaries. Citizenship and location do not control whether you can participate in a nation’s primary subreddit. This is not to imply that Reddit is solely a means of propaganda for foreign states and entities, but if it was, there really would be no way to stop it. If I were such a bad actor, that’s exactly where I would go — especially in a place like Canada, where there are severe limitations on where people actually get their news. It’s free to join, free to use, and it is completely anonymous, that’s dangerous in the wrong unregulated hands.
There is one more key intended failsafe on reddit that needs to be mentioned: the moderators. In each and every subreddit, there are moderators — essentially the judge, jury, and president of each individual sub. There can be one moderator, or many. This scales with the amount of activity in the subreddit. Most of these people, I presume (especially those in the smaller subreddits), are well-meaning volunteers. They are people who are passionate about a certain topic: a TV show from the nineties, a hyperspecific subculture or fan page. Those people are there to police the sub, keep the peace, and make sure that no one is breaking any obvious rules, removing things like racism, hate, and irrelevant content.
Imagine a scenario where two baseball teams find themselves in a final. One is a mighty franchise like the New York Yankees with millions and millions of supporters, and the other is tiny, like say the Milwaukee Brewers. What’s to stop the Yankees fans from going into the Milwaukee subreddit, causing chaos, insulting the team, and making the space intolerable for Brewers fans? In the ideal scenario, that’s what moderators are for — to police those bad actors and prevent that behaviour.
With something as blatantly transparent as sports fandom, it’s pretty easy to see who’s on which side. Moreover, there is a clear understanding of right and wrong.
But what about a subreddit like the one for The New York Times? It is considered the most popular newspaper in the world. You’d figure that the NYT sub would be dedicated to sharing articles from the newspaper. Unfortunately, because of the incentive structures of Reddit, that simply isn’t the case. The subreddit is saturated with hyperpartisan articles that get pushed to the top. Look at the top posts from this year on the r/nytimes subreddit and you see several articles critical of Trump and Pete Hegseth, each with thousands of upvotes. But there’s another subreddit, r/nyt, which brands itself the exact same way: it’s ostensibly all about The New York Times. With r/nyt however, the majority of the top articles have four times the upvotes, and curiously, almost all of them have headlines that demonize Israel.
Thus there are two distinct New York Times reddit realities, both focused and biased in different directions, seemingly representative of the publication on Reddit. For a casual user, it is impossible to know which reality is correct, if at all. A naive news seeker could not be blamed for subscribing to either of those subreddits and seeing the top headlines, with thousands of upvotes as benign the dominant narratives. From there it is a short trip to form opinions based on this shifted reality, Reddit is a pretty well respected site, after all. Compounding this pattern over millions of users, and thousands of subreddits, can have serious implications. The mob mentality is strong on Reddit, and it is not at all obvious to most users.
To dive a little deeper, the two descriptions for the two New York Times subreddits mentioned above are: “Unofficial subreddit to share, highlight, discuss, and comment upon New York Times content, features, staff, and management” versus “All things about the New York Times — now with the allowance of offbeat and sometimes spirited news discussion.” Which is real? Both? Neither?
Then what happens in another scenario when there is only one dominant subreddit for an important topic, and it is firmly ideologically captured?
This brings us full circle to the news of the past week: Mark Carney on antisemitism, and my attempts to share an article in the r/canada subreddit. There are 1.4 million members in that forum. The article I was trying to post was penned by the senior rabbi of the biggest synagogue in the country. It was blocked by one person.
In other words, an article from a prominent Jewish figure published in the biggest Canadian newspaper, about the Prime Minister making a speech about antisemitism, which he attended live, was banned. It wasn’t allowed to surface because the moderator(s) of r/canada believed it to be breaking a rule.
They said: “The language in this headline is inappropriate for it to be discussed reasonably” — and the post was removed for Rule 7: No Trolling / No Brigading.
This censorship hits directly at the core issue with Reddit. I disagreed with that decision, but there was no recourse, no true way to appeal. There is one person on the other end who gets to decide. They weren’t elected, and they aren’t getting paid. There is no one to escalate and raise this to. This matters more because plenty of Canadians are on Reddit and are looking to the r/Canada sub as a community run, non-partisan, objective place where people can share ideas. But there is a very human, and very biased filter on the front end, literally moderating the content for better or for worse. This is happening at scale.
Now, I don’t necessarily think the specific moderator who denied the post has a political agenda or is an antisemite. But the point is, I have no idea who that moderator is, or what their incentives are. Having a cursory look at the list, it could have been any of the people who go by: u/haggis_boy, or u/data_error, or u/voteoutofspite (these are some of their real handles). They could be anyone in the country. They might not even be Canadian at all. They bring their own biases, which are not reflected or made clear in an environment that is headline focused and presented as objective. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether antisemitic bias — or one individual’s view on Israel — played a role. Who is watching these watchmen? Is anyone even aware of this hidden hand tipping the scales of the discourse?
Run afoul of the moderators, and they can ban you from the subreddit for any reason. Getting banned means you can’t participate. There are no rules except those that the moderators decide. There is real irony in the fact that the more open the platform appears, the more hidden gatekeepers there tend to be.
Reddit, for its part, is very clever about dodging criticism for this. They will not take responsibility, because from their perspective, this is a private, individual subreddit that is completely controlled, operated, and moderated the same way the rest of the subs are. Who are they to define how successful communities should operate?
The philosophy is grounded in well-meaning free internet ideals. But humans ruin everything - see: enshitification/platform decay. There are dozens of access points for bad actors, bots, biases, unfairness, lack of justice, and propaganda to enter the Reddit ecosystem. Whether it’s echo chambers, bad moderators, misinformation, harassment, or brigading — all of these can easily happen on Reddit, and there is no recourse for anyone. This is a free platform. They don’t owe you anything.
The problem is particularly acute in Canada. Globally, Canada is the most captured audience when it comes to Reddit. According to the platform, there are 18 million active users in Canada alone each week — this is the highest market penetration Reddit has in any country in the world. This is almost certainly because news-seekers have been forced to look elsewhere, given that news is no longer being serviced by Facebook and Instagram.
When we look at why Canada has some of the worst antisemitism in the world, we must ask whether it is a coincidence that a huge portion of its young people are on Reddit.
There are solutions available. The Canadian government could treat Reddit the same way it treats Meta, and demand that it be looped into Bill C-18.
Something could also change on the platform’s side. Reddit could implement rules around having the company moderate subreddits that reach a certain size, or they should have to at least be held responsible if/when users are subject to harassment and written abuse.
On a global scale, the problem gets a lot worse as AI and LLMs become more and more entrenched in day to day life. Reddit openly advertises that it is the single largest source of citations for LLMs. When you ask Google, or Copilot, or Claude a question, it has been trained on highly upvoted Reddit posts. These models cannot actually know what the true answer is: they don’t think. They operate on probabilities and upvoted Reddit posts are most probably true. This is the end game we must worry about. The feedback loop that starts with opinion is supercharged with bias and potential for bad actors, and then viewed through a prism of computers and robots. This results in popular opinion being reported as fact. That frontier is the grey area that humans struggle to stay vigilant about over time. When you ask AI a question, eventually you stop asking for the source. It will not tell you the difference between fact and opinion.
There is optimism in the latest pivot being realized online. Long form platforms like Substack, independent podcasts, Youtube video essays, and emerging third party sites like The Hub continue to pick up steam and eyeballs. Just as large swaths of the young population are captured with dopamine quick hitters via Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts, substance thirsty people are seeking better content. To be self-serving, this was one of the key inspirations in starting accordingto, getting real discourse front and centre in the Canadian consciousness.
These ideals are antithetical once a platform like Reddit reaches a big enough scale. The gatekeepers, however well intended, will inevitably stifle good discourse. Perhaps it is as simple as a paywall making all the difference. There is a good maxim in the tech world: if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. This is never more true than with Reddit, a multibillion dollar social media platform that has to this point been ignored by the Canadian government. Banning news on Facebook didn’t solve any problems with the news industry, it just moved them to somewhere with even less transparency. You cannot fight human nature.
One avenue that absolutely should be pursued: an actual study on what impact Reddit is having on antisemitism and polarization in Canada. Similar to this one published last April by SamaraCanada. Canadians should be aware where that traffic is coming from, and how the conditions might have been supercharged by the Meta news ban.
It’s time we started paying more attention.